An Alaskan journalist's perspective on local and national issues

Posts tagged ‘Alabama’

Boy, it’s almost getting hard to take this stuff seriously, isn’t it? I mean, how can this possibly be real? What kind of cop in his right mind would shoot a naked college student? Here’s the story –

In south Alabama, a college student, named Gil Collar, was doing as college students are want to do, and was running around naked. Hopefully this wasn’t the result of a stupid Frat pledge or some other dumb thing. However, this student found his away to a police station. He was banging on the doors there, and an officer came out. According to the officer, when he came out, the kid adopted a fighting stance. The officer claims to have repeatedly tried to back off and “diffuse the situation,” but the kid just kept coming. It was then that the officer’s next course of action was to draw his gun and kill the kid. Yeah…this explanation is as bogus as it sounds.

First, let’s look at the facts. This is a 130lb college student. He is butt-naked, and has no weapons on him. He is banging on a police station window at 1 in the morning. He supposedly took a fighting stance when a cop comes out after he was banging on a window. This officer, who probably not only had a gun on him, but probably had a taser, or a baton, or some mace, and also his fists (which come equipped with hours upon hours of hand-to-hand combat training), shot and killed this kid. Seeing the problems?

How could this officer have felt that his life was in danger? This is a well-trained cop going up against a naked kid. That is not only ridiculous, it is down-right silly. And as you can imagine, this story that is filled with plot-holes has not been well-received by the community. They think that it is just as bogus as this particular blogger.

There is no way, unless this was some idiot rookie who didn’t know that all that training can actually be used for something, this story makes no sense. And of course, the “horrible” punishment for an officer who appears to have killed someone for no good reason is that he has been put on paid leave while they investigate. These cases almost universally favor the cops, so you can bet that the officer won’t be punished in any significant way. In fact, he is probably going to walk away unscathed, as police almost always do.

We have talked about this before, but it bears repeating – something needs to be done about the cops! Are are giving thugs uniforms, badges, guns, and almost complete legal immunity. These are a class of people who have no fear of the hammer coming down on them. That has to go! We need oversight on these guys!

Every week, it seems, we are hearing stories about the police killing people’s pets, like in Missouri, where the cops killed the family dog, pepper-sprayed the puppies, and were going to kill the puppies, all during what was supposed to be a marijuana bust (and they only found a bag, which was enough for a misdemeanor charge). And the murdering of pets is nothing new. There is a blog where it is documented when police kill a family’s animals.

There are a lot of states in this country where people are getting in trouble for filming the police. That’s interesting. Why would the police not want to be filmed? Could it be because they don’t want their thuggish tactics and their blatant abuse of power getting out.

A warning to all cops – you are now being watched. You are now in the public eye. You are not safe. The internet knows who you are, and the internet does not forgive and forget. The internet will still be here tomorrow. The public is wise to your game, and we are going to fight back.